Overviews

One of the pieces which has been missing from MMORPG Tycoon 2 for a long time
has been a useful high-level overview of what’s going on inside the game
simulation. You’ve always been able to see how many people are subscribed, and
you’ve been able to look at each individually to see how they’re each doing,
but there hasn’t been a single display which shows a big-picture view of what’s
going on, so that’s what I’ve been working on over the past few days.

MMORPG Overview

What you’re looking at in the screen above is my normal test MMORPG game,
“Titan Prophecy”, and its overview.

When I first implemented this screen, I was surprised by a few things.

Killers like to pit their skill against other human players, or to cause
mayhem amongst other human players.

So it surprised me, initially, to find that this test game had so many more
Explorer-types subscribed than others, and notably more Socialiser-types than
either Achievers or Killer types. Were Achievers and Killers becoming unhappy
with the game much faster than Explorers and Socialisers, and unsubscribing?

After investigation, though, this skew in the player population turned out to
have a simple explanation; when this game was created, it was set up as a
Story-Focused game, which made it more attractive to Explorers and Socialisers,
and less attractive to Achievers and Killers. We weren’t losing those other
types due to any specific problem, they simply weren’t subscribing as often.

Another interesting thing I noticed was that I seemed to be losing subscribers
at a surprisingly rapid pace. A few minutes before I took this screenshot, I
had over 500 subscribers. And a few minutes later, I had 300. Then 200. And
the average player “happiness” level is negative. Clearly something was going
wrong, but what?

The problem, it turned out, quite soon became the #1 thing showing up in the
“Player Thoughts” area. Apparently, during a previous testing session I had
set up each of the games’ respawn points to charge a $100 “micropayment” for
each respawn after dying. I’m pretty sure I did that in order to test the
logic around what players would do if someone was silly enough to set a
real-world dollar price on respawning in an MMORPG, and then forgot to change
it back when I finished testing.

…and as it turns out, this is what they do; they complain, and then they
unsubscribe en masse.

I still need to add buttons which will take you to the target of each of the
most common player thoughts, so you can (for example) tell precisely which
respawn point is the one with the mis-set price. Or if everybody is
complaining about some player, you can go right to them and ban them (or reward
them, or whatever). In this case, I only had two respawn points in the whole game,
so it was easy to find the problem one. But it’ll be even easier in the near
future!

Another interesting note is that this screen is pointing out (in the ‘World
Summary’ box) that my highest-level player is level 3, but I’m only providing
content to service players up to level 2. I didn’t think the game had been
running long enough for anybody to have reached level 3 yet, but apparently
somebody has (in fact, there was somebody who was level 4 a little earlier, but
they unsubscribed immediately before I took this screenshot). These poor
players with nothing left for them to do had apparently just been grinding,
killing level 2 monsters for not much experience, and slowly gaining levels
because there was never else for them to do.

Still a lot more UI reports to go! And I imagine that most of the development
time for the forseeable future will be around finding useful pieces of data
from the game simulation and presenting it in a usable fashion. That was
certainly the main problem with the original MMORPG Tycoon; players
didn’t have enough information to be able to tell precisely what was going
wrong in their games. I definitely don’t want this version of the game to
suffer from that same problem!